Category: Blog

I’m speaking on many panels at the SF Writers Conference this Feb. 13-16, plus doing the Self Publishing Boot Camp on Monday Feb. 17. I love this conference – it’s basically a petting zoo for west coast agents, and it’s a wonderful way to get a crash course in all things publishing and writing.

If you’re in the SF area, come to the conference – and the poetry track is entirely free, including the nighttime readings with star speakers, open mic nite, and music. It’ll be a party – especially if you join us!

During my visit to the London Book Fair, I interviewed Nicholas Humphrey for the BookBaby eBook release of the 20th anniversary edition of his great work A History of the Mind.

In this clip, I ask him about what philosophers mean when they say that it feels “like” something to have subjective experience, and why he makes a distinction between perception and sensation.

Nick believes that perceptual knowledge, by itself, lacks qualitative information. I perceive that the door is closed, but it doesn’t feel “like” something that it’s close; I may know that Paris is the capital of France, but knowing that doesn’t feel “like” anything in the way that eating a peach or hearing a siren does. That’s because there’s a sharp distinction between perceptual knowledge and sensory expression.

Humphrey argues that we perceive in parallel with sensation, rather than building perception up from nested levels of sense data. His experiments in blindsight show that higher level perception can go on without sensation – for blindsight sufferers, they can, in a sense, see, but it’s not “like” anything for them and doesn’t enrich their lives. Nick’s take is that we have an ancestral pathway which supplies us the rich sense of being touched by light, smells, etc., and the experience of what’s happening to me at the moment, the thick moment in which stimuli are touching me and I’m responding to them. This activity generates a reverberating loop which extends the moment of consciousness beyond the physical instant so that we feel that we’re living in “thick time,” the “thick moment of consciousness.”

I asked Nick why, it feels “like” something when I’m working on a difficult math problem. He replied that while we’re working out of problem, we’re working not just with our brains, but with our bodies too: often we’re clenching fists, hunched over, and generating somatic sensations that are part of sense of working on the problem – they’re genuine sensations with qualitative dimension supplied by feedback from bodies. So it’s not the cogitation producing that feeling – it’s the way our bodies are involved in almost everything we do. For Humphrey, it may be “like” something to solve a math problem, but not “like” something in the same way as it is when, for example, seeing red.

The idea of it feeling “like” something to have subjective experience was introduced by the philosopher Thomas Nagel to get at the qualitative dimension of sensory consciousness. Nick believes that seeing red is “like” something because it has a time dimension it couldn’t have – it seems to outlast the physical moment, flowing on in subjective time from thick moment to thick moment, each one seeming to outlast its physical presence. But while sensation is flowing on it’s not happening in physical time but instead in subjective time, from thick moment to thick moment which seems to outlast its own presence. While that’s a physical impossibility, we feel it’s “like” that – it *couldn’t* be that, but seems to be “like” that.

It’s a joy to be releasing the 20th anniversary edition of Nicholas Humphrey’s A History of the Mind through BookBaby. I had the great pleasure of writing the forward for the book and interviewing him at the London Book Fair this year.

During my visit to the London Book Fair, I interviewed Nicholas Humphrey for the BookBaby eBook release of the 20th anniversary edition of his great work A History of the Mind.

In this clip, he discusses how religion is parasitic on the human impulse to spirituality. Humphrey considers “spirituality” to stem from the “mind-body problem” which still dogs science and philosophy: how can our qualitative experiences be produced solely from the material substance of the brain? The fact that our sensory functions provide us with such rich experiences give rise to the notion that we have a “soul” as the seat of experience.

Every day, we awake to amazing sensations, a new universe we create within ourselves which is essentially unshareable – and the idea that we’re focal singularities of consciousness gives rise to the feeling of “spirituality” – that we’re special because we’re hosts to internally generated, out-of-the-world phenomena.

Humans are therefore profoundly individualist, and they discover the importance of selves through private experiences which they can glory in, develop, and feed, as a bubble of consciousness which no one else can enter. And when we attribute similar experiences to others, it changes our relationship to the world in ways which are hugely productive. So the notion that we have “souls” has transformed society – leading us to empathize with others whom (we assume) also feel as the centers of their own private experience.

For Humphrey, those impulses have been subjugated and captured by religious systems , which are parasitic on human spirituality. The real problem of having a “soul” which matters so much to us is that we invest so much in it. Our experience is that this “soul” disappears every night, but we’ve always had it come back. A primary driver of human achievement is the illusion – and mistake – that it will go on forever.

It’s a joy to be releasing the 20th anniversary edition of Nicholas Humphrey’s A History of the Mind through BookBaby. I had the great pleasure of writing the forward for the book and interviewing him at the London Book Fair this year.

During my visit to the London Book Fair, I interviewed Nicholas Humphrey for the BookBaby eBook release of the 20th anniversary edition of his great work A History of the Mind.

In this clip, he discusses the phenomenon of blindsight as evidence of there being different internal pathways of sensation and perception. For Nick, perception is time-independent judgment of what’s “out there” in the world, and sensation is sensation involves the subject’s own interaction with stimuli, an active process which is an emotion-laden and which accrues through time.

An experiment showed him the reality of the distinction. The visual cortex in the back of a monkey’s brain was removed, but while the monkey believed she couldn’t see, she managed quite well visually, picking up objects and navigating through the world, although she had to be continually persuaded to do it. Some humans with damage to their visual cortex have “blindsight” as well – they will say they’re blind and feel no visual sensations, but if you ask them questions, they have access to a fair amount of visual information.

Humphrey’s conclusion is that information alone is not enough to create the feeling, the joy, the sense of presence and involvement in the act of “seeing.” These blindsight patients are lacking the dimension of sensation and cannot react internally to the stimuli’s qualities with emotional bodily expression. And that expression – that active response – is the basis for the “qualia of sensation,” the qualities we value so much when talking about consciousness.

It’s a joy to be releasing the 20th anniversary edition of Nicholas Humphrey’s A History of the Mind through BookBaby. I had the great pleasure of writing the forward for the book and interviewing him at the London Book Fair this year.

It’s a joy to be releasing the 20th anniversary edition of Nicholas Humphrey’s A History of the Mind through BookBaby. I had the great pleasure of writing the forward for the book and interviewing him at the London Book Fair this year.

Nick says that the book was the result of years of research and theorizing of what it’s like to be conscious, to live in what he calls “the present tense of sensation.” AHOTM was written to be complementary to Daniel Dennett’s seminal work Consciousness Explained. Whereas Daniel Dennett’s book discusses the mind as decision-maker, an apparatus for creating future, and a “cerebral office,” Nick emphasized the human self, and how it takes delight in the feeling of being alive. Humphrey’s take is that we are active participants in sensation: rather than there being anything in the world inherently red, salty, or painful, our experiences are created by us and projected out into the world. In this way, we are participants in our own experience and light the world up with our own consciousness.

Let the chicken sit in a bowl of cold water with 2 teaspoons of salt for 20 minutes. Drain well and pour the margarine into the bowl, stirring to coat the chicken. Place the chicken in a 9×13 inch baking pan, arranged so that the pieces are close together. Mix together the flour and pepper; using a sifter or small strainer, sift them over the chicken. Pour in the water at the edge of the pan. Bake at 375 degrees for about 45 minutes.
Serves 4-5.

Note. If too much flour is left on the chicken when it’s done, just spoon some of the cooking liquid over the top of the chicken, but remember that this should have a crispy crust.

Mix all the ingredients, except the chicken wings, in a large bowl. Remove and discard the tips from the chicken wings. Place the wings in the bowl and turn to coat with the mixture. Leave to marinate in a cool place for at least 30 minutes, or for a couple of
hours if possible.

Remove the wings from the marinade, place on a cooking sheet and cook in a preheated oven at 400°F for 25—30 minutes, or until cooked through. Baste once or twice with the marinade during cooking. Finish off under a hot broiler, for not more than 5 minutes.

• 5 pounds assorted greens (collard, kale, mustard, and turnip greens, in any combination), tough stems discarded
• 2 medium onions , chopped
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 2 jalapenos , seeded and minced, optional
• 1 (1 1/2-pound) smoked turkey wing
• Seasoned salt and freshly ground black pepper
Directions:
Tear the greens into large pieces. Wash the greens well in a sink full of cold water. Lift the greens out of the sink and transfer to a large bowl, leaving the grit to fall to the bottom of the sink. (Be sure you get all the grit out of the greens. If necessary, wash again.) Do not drain the greens in a colander.

In a large pot, combine the onions, two cups water, oil, and jalapenos, if using. Bring to a boil over high heat. Gradually stir in the greens, allowing each batch to wilt before adding more greens. Bury the turkey wing in the greens. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Cover and reduce the heat to medium-low. Cook, stirring occasionally, just until the greens are tender, about 30 minutes. Do not overcook the greens or they will lose their color and fresh flavor. Remove the turkey wing. Discard the skin and bones, chop the turkey meat, and return to the pot. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the greens to a serving dish. Serve hot.

In a blender or food processor, puree 1 cup corn kernels with melted butter and eggs.

In a large bowl, combine all remaining ingredients, except parmesan cheese.

Add pureed corn and mix well. Pour into casserole dish, sprinkle with parmesan and baked for 30 minutes, or until puffed and golden.
(note: you can broil for a couple of minutes at end to get golden spots on top).